The idea of just going sailing - and not actually continuing
to work for a living - is one that has been with me for a long
time. But life, I convinced myself, kept getting in the way.

When my first wife, Sandra, died very young, I already owned a
small cruising boat; a Pandora 22 footer. I talked about sailing
away for ever (or a few months) in that, but not for the first or
last time, I found myself an excuse for not doing what I talked
about.

That 'excuse' turned out to be a more-or-less unsatisfactory
marriage, which none the less lasted for nine years. I then lived
for another five years on my own, with various passing
girlfriends and assorted boats, until I married again, into a
four-and-a-half year disaster - although I didn't realise what a
disaster it was until about four years and five months into it!
The trouble is, I guess, that I have always believed in the idea
of marriage, although success in the day to day achievement of it
seems to have eluded me.

Also during that marriage, in fact only four months before the
end of it, I had a minor heart-attack. So, single again at the
reasonably ripe age of 52, I understood that life, or perhaps
God, was trying quite hard to tell me something. But I also knew
it would take me some time to work it all out. A year down the
line, with my general health seeming to be pretty fair (touching
wood and clasping the bottle of little tablets), I started to
think that I could have got it worked out after all. The last
wife and I had come to some sort of agreement a few months before
over finance, and like many women in a separation, I felt that
she'd managed to keep the lion's share of our joint worth. After
a lifetime of reasonably hard work and approximate endeavour, I
had what I thought was a remarkably small amount of money, around
£30,000 in cash, stashed away in premium bonds and building
societies. So what good could that amount of money do me ?

Looked at from a conventional viewpoint, not very much. It was a
sufficient sum to preclude me from housing benefit - and most of
the rest of the benefit system - if I lost my job; I'd have to
spend about ten thousand pounds on surviving and living before
they'd even pay anything towards my rent. With the job market the
way it is, it didn't seem worthwhile to plough the money into a
house and carry on labouring away to pay the mortgage; and if the
job collapsed, then I'd only have to sell it and effectively
start all over again. If I managed until the endowments paid it
off, who would ultimately benefit from that ? Only my legatees,
and much as I love my niece and nephew, I could not really see
why I had to give them everything. If I popped my clogs before
the age of 62 they'd do fine, and if I survived, then I'd get a
good deal more from the endowments with bonuses and whatnot.

The money could do me far more personal good as the funding for
an extended holiday, however. The sums were pretty simple. I felt
reasonably confident that I could afford a small sailing cruiser
or motor-sailer for around five to six thousand pounds, live on
it for a couple of years on fourteen or fifteen thousand, and
still come home to five thousand pounds stashed away and whatever
value the boat retained. There were plenty of possible scenarios.
Get a little motor boat and meander about on the French canals,
after doing a quick flit across the Channel in a flat calm.
Day-sail in convenient and enjoyable chunks down the coasts of
France, Spain and Portugal, past Gibraltar into the
Mediterranean, in a yacht. Or combine the two, cutting corners by
joining the canal system where convenient, yet still enjoying the
pleasure of sailing the easy or interesting bits.

Well, I'd always enjoyed sailing, and only found it really hard
going when I made stupid mistakes, usually caused by not thinking
things through properly beforehand. I started talking about the
options, and as always when you talk about possibilities, they
started to become clearer, and much more practical.

Spend fifty pounds on a couple of books and a chart or two, and
the ideas turn very rapidly into pencil lines on paper, and
port-to-port voyages become stepped-off distances with the brass
dividers.

Study the pilot book on chill winter evenings, and dreams
quickly become wonderfully disturbing visions of hot summer
sunrises over recognisable cliffs and the shapes of distant
islands.

So I could buy the boat, quit my job in the spring of 2000 (what
a year to do something dramatic and exciting!), and then with all
the books and charts, and after a winter-time of thinking about
it, decide on where I'd go. There wouldn't be any no-go areas,
except those due to the limits of my abilities, or my confidence
in the boat.

There were certainly plenty of boats about, inside my
price-range. I'd seen a delightful Macwester 26 in Hullbridge,
near Southend, which had everything I needed, except that it had
a petrol rather than a diesel engine, and it was comfortably
large enough for one or two people to live aboard for a very
extended period. With a shallow draft and bilge keels, it could
also go up the smallest creek and sit happily on the mud. In
addition, the autumn of 1999 was coming on rapidly, and there
would be plenty of other suitable yachts for sale as the weather
cooled. Given common sense, fair sailing weather and reasonably
good fortune, most of those boats would get to most places with
safety.

Obviously, something like that Macwester 26 wouldn't be a good
idea pitched up against a North Atlantic storm, but it would be
just fine cruising down any coast from Britain to Spain in daily
hops, and with the mast lowered onto the cabin roof, it would
potter safely and very happily along the French canals to the
Mediterranean. And with good forecasts, and help from a crew of
some sort to make voyages of more than 100 miles or so, it could
cheerful cruise the Med from Gibraltar to Greece. Perhaps I could
call on my nephew and his mates, tough lads in their late teens,
to spend some of their holiday times with me when I needed
watch-keepers.

As far as living costs were concerned, I knew that as a
born-again non-smoker - instant conversion, of course, after a
heart attack - my living costs could be ludicrously low if I
worked at it. For instance, buying absolutely all my food on a
credit card gave me a bill of around a hundred pounds a month -
add a couple of hundred for pocket money, drink and odds and
ends, and another hundred for boat costs like fuel and
maintenance, and the total came to four hundred pounds a month.
That's less than five thousand pounds a year.

Winter, of course, could be spent in some quiet marina or tucked
into a small harbour somewhere - perhaps five or six months of
mooring fees to be paid, but probably not too much extra money
gone. And eating Christmas pudding in shorts and a tee-shirt had
always appealed. If I managed to generate any other income while
away, that would be useful for either enhancing the lifestyle or
extending the period; otherwise I could come home to virtually
nothing, and the state would provide - well, " sort-of ".

This last was an interesting side-light which I'd discovered,
more or less by accident. While paying in my community charge, I
had a brief conversation with one of the ladies on reception at
the council offices. " If I went away for a couple of years,
and came home pretty broke, how would I get on for somewhere to
live ? " I asked.
" We'd probably put you in a bed-and-breakfast place, "
she said, "and then one of the housing trusts would try to
find you something more permanent. "
" Just like that ? "
" Just like that, " she said. Then she grinned at me. "
I'd be gone, if I were you. "

One other factor which encouraged me - but totally amazed me -
was just how big my supporters' club was becoming. Virtually
everyone I mentioned the idea to said, " Stop talking about
it, just do it ", "I would if I could, " or " Can I
come with you ? " They seemed to jump onto the idea with
enthusiasm, and I tried to track down the reasons behind this.
After a great number of discussions, I thought that it was simply
a reflection of how difficult many people find it to deal with
the world we live in. Employers want more and more from their
workers, whatever they do; relationships seem harder and harder
to maintain, and ordinary, hardworking and averagely intelligent
people like you and me find life increasingly difficult to cope
with.

Certainly the break-down of my own relationship, where I'd
thought I was quite secure and safe, had left me feeling lonely,
and concerned about my personal future. The job I was doing was
just that, a job, giving me an income in return for my time. If
you had the chance and the choice, and were totally without major
or unavoidable responsibilities, wouldn't you opt to walk away
?

Probably the most vociferous and outspoken of the supporters was
my sister Jill, whose enthusiasm for the idea, tempered
with a constant little nagging doubt about my actually having the
courage to do it, probably helped more than anyone else to get me
going. She knew me too well - easily sidetracked is one way of
saying it. But after six months of saying " I'm going to do
it, " every time we talked about it, I'd painted myself so
far into a corner I knew that I simply had to go anyway!

23 feet of glass fibre hull, with a big lump of lead hung
underneath and an alloy pole supporting nylon sails perched on
top of it, is not exactly how we choose to think of a yacht. But
the reality is that that's exactly what it is; a complex amalgam
of materials and stresses and strains, brought together to make
something which will face the sea and survive, carry a small
group of frail and not very weather-resistant human beings about
in relative safety, and provide caravan-like comfort when in
port.

Hopefully, that's what I've bought!

Pamela Jane is a 23ft Virgo Voyager class
sailing yacht build in 1979, with five berths, twin bilge keels,
and a 1993 15h.p. Nanni twin-cylinder diesel engine. Although the
advertising does say she can accommodate 5 people, I wouldn't
like to be one of them; boats of this size are fine for a couple
who get on well, maybe with a child or two for weekends, but no
more. She has a white hull, yellow stripe just below the rubbing
strake, and yellow strips on her otherwise white coachroof. It
may sound horrible, but it looks okay . . .

Buying a boat is a pretty traumatic experience, as well as being
expensive.

There are hundreds on the market all the time, and dozens within
easy viewing reach of my base - the old firm must have
unknowingly spent quite a few pounds on supporting my travels to
boatyards around East Anglia. Every time you go to any boatyard
or marina, you see several for sale within the budget, and many
which are well over the top, but which you'd nonetheless really
like to buy. I really did look at a lot, ranging from about 22
feet to 26 feet in length, and from about £5,000 to
£10,000 in price.

I rather fell in love with a couple before finding Pamela
Jane, but in each case there was something a little
suspect or unsuitable about them. Probably the all-time favourite
was a Samphire 23, which was a proper little deep-keel,
deep sea cruiser, quite capable of major voyages in reasonable
conditions, and surviving reasonably in really bad weather.

But eventually . . . I found Pamela Jane purely fortuitously,
when trying to be a bit clever.

The nearest marina to my home was only about 5 miles away, at
Levington on the River Orwell in Suffolk. It has its own
semi-tame yacht brokerage, which runs a annual "boat-sale" event,
offering owners special deals for a weekend which is
well-publicised in the local and specialist press. So I went to
the marina a fortnight before the sale, and there discovered
Pamela Jane, with her then owners Graham and Pamela on board,
tidying up.

We spent a long time talking, and I had a really good look
around the little yacht - I was very impressed by the way she'd
been kept, and the attitude of her owners, who'd looked after her
carefully and lovingly. They also had a reassuring survey report
from this spring (April 99) which gave her a sparklingly clean
bill of health.

I suppose someone tougher-minded than me would have pushed their
price of £7,000 down a few hundred. But having seen similar
yachts for sale at much higher prices, and feeling strongly that
I would be getting a straight deal from a very straight couple, I
offered them their asking price through the agent within a couple
of hours of seeing the boat - I went for a stride along the
promenade at Felixstowe between seeing the boat and offering the
money. They accepted at once, and I went back to the yacht for a
cup of tea.